TitleNews Online Archive

TitleNews Online Archive

Freddie funds homeownership centers

February 20, 2003

NeighborWorks pledge part of President's housing agenda

Inman News Features

Freddie Mac has committed $2 million to the national NeighborWorks network of 220 nonprofit housing and community-revitalization organizations. The funds will be used to innovate new ways to enable more minority households and other "underserved families" overcome financial and cultural barriers to homeownership.

The funding commitment was announced today at Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation's training institute in Atlanta. The commitment marks the expansion of a 10-year alliance between Freddie Mac and NeighborWorks that has helped more than 67,000 low- and moderate-income families become homeowners, according to Freddie Mac.

NRC plans to use Freddie Mac's five-year grant to build additional NeighborWorks homeownership centers and expand the activities of 50 existing centers nationwide. The funding also will help expand the scope of the HUD Housing Choice Voucher program, which enables qualified renters to apply the equivalent of their Section 8 rental subsidies to mortgage payments.

The expanded five-year commitment also includes sponsorship of national symposia to address critical housing and community revitalization issues. The symposia will be conducted as part of Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation's training institute, which is held four times annually in locations around the country.

Freddie Mac Chairman Leland Brendsel said the alliance underscores Freddie Mac's and NRC's "mutual commitment to put more families on the path to homeownership and greater personal financial security."

Freddie Mac said its commitment is a component of its plan to help achieve the Bush Administration's goal of adding 5.5 million minority homeowners to the nation's homeownership ranks by the end of the decade.

Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp., which founded and supports the national NeighborWorks network, is a public nonprofit corporation chartered by Congress in 1978 to revitalize neighborhoods through increased homeownership, resident leadership, development of decent affordable rental housing, training and resident leadership.

Freddie Mac is a stockholder-owned corporation chartered by Congress in 1970 to supply lenders money to make mortgages and package those mortgages into marketable securities.